Ask HN: Could Apple use their neural engine in the M1 to accelerate gaming?

1 points by sycren 5 years ago | 2 comments

The Apple Neural Engine (ANE) consists of a "16-core architecture capable of 11 trillion operations per second, the Neural Engine in M1 enables up to 15x faster machine learning performance. In fact, the entire M1 chip is designed to excel at machine learning, with ML accelerators in the CPU and a powerful GPU, so tasks like video analysis, voice recognition and image processing will have a level of performance never seen before on the Mac." - https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2020/11/apple-unleashes-m1/

The ANE is powerful where it comes to dealing with matrices, which are also used within games dealing with physics like collision detection or even real-time ray-tracing. - https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine

The unified memory also makes it easier for the ANE and GPU to work together, instead of the GPU graphics pipeline or CPU creating bottlenecks. - https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems/part-v-performance-and-practicalities/chapter-28-graphics-pipeline-performance

Gaming has always been an area that macs have somewhat lacked in compared to High performance gaming rigs, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft DirectX, GPU choice, drivers and compatibility.

Could Apple integrate the ANE into Metal to give ios/mac game developers their own version of DirectX offering an increased edge over their pc competition; providing increased complexity for games, superior graphics and frame rates utilising the CPU, ANE and GPU working together over the unified memory?

cyrillenajjar 5 years ago |

The ANE is certainly impressive, and delivering considerable capabilities Apple is now giving phenomenal compute power for both gaming and non gaming applications. However the new streaming type of gaming like Stadia and Luna seems to be more likely the future evolution of processors in hardware consoles. A Streaming type of gaming makes much more sense in the long run.. Apple One subscription only re-enforces this direction.

brudgers 5 years ago |

Apple could. History suggests it won't. Gaming has never been an area where Apple has put its competitive energy. Gaming ecosystems require working closely with third party developers. Apple has been moving in the opposite direction for years.